Fault Lines
Reviews

A cute summer vacation read I’d say. I liked the descriptions of Tokyo. It felt like it would be another bodice ripper/shades of grey thing towards the middle but I actually liked it in the end.

I loved this book! I went right back to the beginning as soon as I finished…I never do that.

"I wonder who she loved, and what she hid, and when it stopped hurting her to remember, even while she was pretending to have forgotten." i waver on how i felt about this. the narrator was certainly not your typical japanese voice as itami's british slang emerged over and over again (imagine "twat" and "mukaebi" being used in the same sentence lol), so the dialogue was a little more westernized than i expected. the romance too — at some points the interactions felt strangely disorienting? like i was watching the intertwining of entire cultures through the (sometimes melodramatic, oft-cringe) exchanges of two people. most of all, though, i appreciated the candidness of mizuki's internal struggle as she weighed her own happiness against her duties as a wife and mother. some of her musings could have been extracted directly from my own journal lmao. in the end, how much is a dream worth? as muzuki puts it, it's all a part of love, "the deep desire to roll the dice and find out, always with the absurd hope, flying like a kite, that you might just be the ones who manage to hold onto each other through it all."

I was highly anticipating this novel but in the end it just turned out mediocre. I was always waiting for something more to happen, but it never did.

This is a quiet book. We are inside the mind and life of Mizuki, a Tokyo mother with a "perfect" life with two children, a handsome husband, and good friends. But she finds herself wondering if that's all there is. And one day, she meets Kiyoshi, a restaurant owner. Suddenly, she feels alive and finds herself being drawn into a relationship and facing a choice.
I think most of us who have been stay-at-home mothers understand Mizuki. We've all felt the sameness of seasons of life. I disagreed with what Mizuki did, but I felt for her, looking for her footing in her new season of life. Plus, Emily Itami created a lovely story of family and fulfillment, and I really enjoyed it.

This is pretty good. I love how insightful it was and all her realizations in her life. Since I am not into these kinds of genre, this is normal to be quite boring for me but I really find this soothing and calming. I love all the lessons I learned and how she describe all those things she values. Such a good good writing. I was quite hesitant since I do not want a boring read to be my first read of the year but this is soo good so I am happy that this has been my first book finished this year 💕

A novel of well realized interiority, where we spend most of our time in the head of a married woman in Japan who feels trapped by her domestic existence. A rift has formed between her husband and most of her time is spent looking after the kids; a job the husband devalues while he works 15 hour days. When the relationship is pushed repeatedly, after numerous cyclical arguments and a constant ineffective communication ritual fails—she allows herself time and space to expand her life in an additional direction: A new relationship with a man who pursues her. Unsure wether it is a friendship or affair, the mere possibility of the new allows her to rediscover who she is from an outsider’s perspective. Subsequently surfacing thoughts of her past. This was smart in a few ways. The prose captured her emotions well, and the interactions—the perspicacity around the foreign substance of a new individual orbiting your life—were Rooneyesque, at times. I think it’s very astute in depicting how much we become the reflection shown to us by the people we have entrenched our lives. There is a dire need for people in different roles. To be always a known quantity and no more, wife, mother, etc. makes a person believe that there was never anything to their identity except those roles because that is the only feedback they ever receive. The fault lines is a very apt metaphor, then. Physically, she (and everyone) is terrified the next earthquake will end her existence. Emotionally, the damage of repressing who she is for so long has caused immense distress, and her own earthquake, though tumultuous and painful, also enables her to feel something different, and to use that feedback to finally understand who she is and where she is now, in her life.

This made me so homesick 😩😭
















Highlights

How many times have I wished I could be outside myself, outside all my limitations and neuroses, so I could make a different decision and live a different life?